State of The Game: March 2010

One of the reasons why you haven’t seen many posts lately on the art of GMing or playing RPGs is that we haven’t really played much lately. That should change in a month or so, as things are settling in our group once more. Two of the players were preoccupied with opening a bar & gallery. Girlfriend DM spends more time at work now, and never gets to have the physical tools to plan a campaign while I am in a transitory stage in terms of my living arrangements.

Things should change. We recently celebrated the bar opening week by using the VIP room to play D&D 4e, resuming Girlfriend DM’s Eberron campaign. Yes, THAT Eberron campaign. Some of you already know that I run an occasional Eberron adventure myself in a campaign entitled Fringes of Khorvaire. There’s a lot of excitement to get the entire party back together, as one party member is currently out of play, both in game terms and out of game terms.

See, his character, a Kalashtar artificer, was recently killed by a Warforged Titan, and we are unable to resurrect him as his heart is missing. So, the more arcane-capable members – meaning anyone that is not me – places his body into gentle repose so we can search for his heart. Furthermore, his soul is trapped in a dragonshard that my Warforged has affixed to his docent. In out of game terms, the player in absentia has been unavailable to us for reasons unknown.

That aside, another group I’m in – the one I run Fringes of Khorvaire for – gearing up for a Shadowrun campaign in the next few weeks that has me really excited to discover what it’s like to be a cybernetically augmented street samurai. I’ll be the only character that is competent at physical combat; everyone else is a hacker, shaman or technomancer. This means that, at best, during combat everyone but me will have eyes roll inwards while they’re on the astral plane or in the Matrix. This could be interesting.

Last, but not least, I’ll be dropping in on a D&D 4th Edition Living Forgotten Realms campaign this Saturday. I didn’t even know they ran Living Forgotten Realms in the Philippines! I got the invite through Meetup.com and was originally a bit less than optimistic about discovering other gamers through it. I’m looking forward to playing with strangers and meeting new gamers. So, yeah, Meetup totally worked for me and I live in a wretched Third World hive of scum and villainy.

That said, I would sincerely appreciate hearing from you guys what the status is on your gaming habits. Is anybody dropping their campaigns? Do you happen to have a new system you’re preparing to get into? Or have you recently discovered or been discovered by a heretofore unknown gaming circle? Let me know in the comments page!

Comments

Glad to hear Meetup worked for you. I haven’t tried it yet, but have heard a few local GMs trying it out. Mostly I tend to pick up new players via various social circles IRL or through friend-of-a-friend. The biggest problem has been with life events (overtime at work, spinal surgery, divorce, etc…) changing player availability suddenly.

I’m hoping to fix this by starting a new campaign using the sandbox style approach that Ars Ludi posted about. If you’ve ever run sandbox style games, I’d be very curious to hear.

Yeah, I was pretty surprised cause I don’t know many Filipinos like myself who have used Meetup for anything at all.

I’m definitely going to try a sandbox approach and am thinking of testing it on an established campaign setting such as Eberron. The world is built with a great sense of geo-politics suited for sandbox adventuring anyway.